Abhi Yerra

Twitter is a semi-useful service. I say semi because a lot of users just post crap such as, “I got up this morning.” I can only say who the hell cares? However, there is a use for Twitter and that is as a notification service for stuff happening on your computer.

Say I am living in the dorms and my floormates and I regularly download tv shows and sometimes we download the same show wasting bandwidth. I want to know if anyone is downloading that same show before I start downloading it. A twitter notification would be great for this since all anyone has to do is check the notifications and see if people are downloading the same file. You can then ask your friend to let you download the file once the file is downloaded. If this were done automatically it’d be awesome which makes me think how did such a simple service get so popular?

I started using my Dad’s Blackberry, which he stopped using a month ago and still kept the service for, and if that is the future we are truly screwed. Today as I was riding the BART I found myself using the device to check on reddit and digg and I felt myself becoming uncomfortable using it. If the device becomes mainstream, especially with the iPhone coming soon, it is going to be disastrous for interaction.

The one thing I really enjoy about riding BART is it gives me a good hour to reflect thoughts and ideas. This disconnected time is important for me because it is so valuable; it is the time I am most free. If we are becoming constantly connected that alone time which is so important for people is gone. So please take that into consideration and give yourself sometime to kick back, relax and disconnect even if it is writing the metro.

I have moved from Dreamhost to Slicehost VPS which is going pretty well. I am running a Debian instance with full root which can be considered a good or bad thing depending on the perspective of if you know me or not. Anyways, it gives me a lot more control over what I can and can’t do on the server since it is basically like having your own server.

I only have had it for a day, but I must say I like it a lot. It is costing me $20 bucks a month and I have to say it is worth it especially since I do a lot of webdev stuff it is good to have a decent server with privileges to change things as I please. Hope to see a lot more projects soon and if you are visiting this site there should be a significent speedup which is nice since Dreamhost was just slow as hell.

If you are signing up if you can use this referral that’d be awesome.

It has been one year since I started this blog and I must say a lot has happened in that one year. Though, I have had a blog in one form or another since before then this one has been my favorite since I have written so much code and have actually made some contributions to people decisions through the MacBook.  Hope to continue for another year!  Some new things coming to the webpage soon.

I’ve been getting so much spam on this blog it’s amazingly annoying. Although, I have Akismet turned on there is still a lot that still gets through. I have been reading that Akismet has been giving false positives and I don’t know if anyone has been trying to contact me, but please email me if you are.

It seems that infrastructure technology to start a startup is almost nil and creating a site like YouTube probably takes a lot less initial investment. This is especially true for sites utilizing Amazon Services like S3 and hopefully once out of beta the EC2.

Think of what YouTube does. It takes in videos encodes them as Flash and just shows them. It’s all a very simple and with Amazon services you can maximize the efficiency of your resources.

How would this be done?

1. Have a public server. This should actually be a server you own and not one using Amazon. All user interactions happen through this site. Authentication and what not.
2. User uploads file to S3. There doesn’t seem to be a way to do this directly through the browser, but possibly through the use of Flash?
   • The uploaded data is put in a separate bucket. Preprocessed?
   • Creates a queue with the file needing to be processed in Amazon SQS.
3.  On your server or Amazon’s using EC2 have a server listen for changes to the queue and distribute the encoding to other servers.
4. Now the magic. You may have heavy loads at times where a bunch of people start uploading files and you need more processing power to encode files then you have so what do you do? Well using EC2 you create server instances on the fly based on the load on the queue. So you have a bunch of instances just encoding data and when you don’t need them you can destroy the instances saving you resources.
5. You move the processed files into S3 and write to your database possibly via another queue so things happen in bulk. (Possibly MySQL Cluster nodes via EC2?)

Now getting all that to work is an exercise in itself, but the point is you have most of the infrastructure of servers taken care of so all it really takes is a good idea and good execution.